Silent night, holy night, All is calm, all is bright. All the animals gather together, Silent harmonious, happy forever. Together Big Bear and Little Bear set out to explore their world and treasure the natural beauty that is all around them.

It's Christmas Eve, and Louis's favorite stuffed animal, Lamb, couldn't be more excited. While Louis is asleep, Lamb tiptoes downstairs and climbs into Santa's great big bag of presents. Inside is a magical world, filled with new friends: other toys waiting to be delivered as gifts. But soon Lamb starts to miss Louis, and he worries he will never make his way back home. Fortunately, Santa is there to save the day, and Louis is just a short sleigh ride away.

While other children may be dreaming of new toys under the tree or stockings filled with treats, one little girl simply asks Santa for a friend to share her holiday. But this is a pretty tall order for the jolly old man. Can Santa make her Christmas wish come true?

Readers of all ages will be cheered to see that Santa manages to find not just the perfect present, but three special gifts.

Humphrey is a giant, and Leetree, his best friend, is an elf. Together they love making wrapping paper for all of Santa’s presents. But this year Santa has asked them to grow a Christmas tree, and the pair couldn’t be more excited! They take great care with their project, planting and watering, snipping and pruning. Finally, the tree is wrapped and ready, and Humphrey and Leetree set off to deliver it. But when disaster strikes, the giant and the elf must come up with a way to make things right. From a small idea comes a big plan—and a surprise no one in Christmastown will soon forget!

Take one robotic Santa, nine cyber-reindeer pulling his techno-sleigh, and twelve days of Christmas circuitry and wizardry—and this incredible holiday offering is guaranteed to add up to every gear-head's delight!

The classic Christmas nativity story is stunningly illustrated by evocative pastel artwork depicting angels, shepherds, and wise men arriving in Bethlehem to share the magic of the birth of Jesus. Lift the gatefold flaps to change the pictures and watch the story unfold along the way.

When Lidia was a child, she spent Christmas with her grandparents, where she learned to cook with her Nonna Rosa by preparing food in their smokehouse and kitchen. Lidia and her brother would also find a big beautiful juniper bush to cut down for their holiday tree. And they made their own holiday decorations with nuts, berries, and herbs they collected for their meals.

This delightful picture book is filled with the story of Lidia’s Christmas traditions, delicious recipes, and decorating ideas all perfected over the years by Lidia and her family.

Readers of all ages will vividly remember trying to peek at hidden gift packages; writing scrolls of wish lists to Santa; and struggling to behave at formal Christmas dinner parties. Always in the background, we know Santa Claus is watching, soon to decide if David deserves a shiny new fire truck or a lump of coal under the tree. From playing with delicate ornaments to standing in an endlessly long line for Santa, here are common Christmas activities--but with David's naughty trimmings.

If there's one thing Llama Llama doesn't like, it's waiting. He and Mama Llama rush around, shopping for presents, baking cookies, decorating the tree . . . but how long is it until Christmas? Will it ever come? Finally, Llama Llama just can't wait any more! It takes a cuddle from Mama Llama to remind him that "Gifts are nice, but there's another: The true gift is, we have each other."

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

We couldn't discuss The Help without serving chocolate pie and this one from Kneaders was scrumptious.

(That pie is a pivotal part of the plot.)

If you want to try your hand at making your own pie, here is the recipe that Kathryn Stockett grew up on, made by her beloved maid, Demetrie.

Demetrie's Chocolate Pie

1-2/3 cups water

5 tablespoons sweetened cocoa powder, such as Ghiradelli

3 tablespoons cornstarch

1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk

3 egg yolks, beaten

2 tablespoons butter

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1 9-inch pie shell, prebaked plain or graham cracker

Whipped cream (or if it’s not too humid, you can top with meringue)

Shaved chocolate to sprinkle on top, for looks

In a medium sized, cool saucepan, mix water, cocoa, and cornstarch with a whisk until all the lumps are gone, making a paste. Stir in condensed milk and egg yolks. Heat to just under a boil and stir until it’s thick.

Reduce heat to low and stir in butter. Add in your good vanilla, and keep stirring well. Turn off the heat and let it cool some. Pour into a prebaked pie shell, storebought if that’s how you do things.

Let the pie set-up in a cool spot, like a plug-in refrigerator, covering with wax paper so you don’t get a skin. Dollop cream on top or top with meringue.

Yield: 1 9 inch pie, 6-8 servings

For all those who loved the book and thought that it would make a great movie you won't have long to wait.

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Bookenders book group will meet on Wednesday, November 17 at 7 p.m. to discuss The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Everyone is invited to attend. If you have read this book and loved it like we have, please come and join us!

The Help is about a young white woman in the early 1960s in Mississippi who becomes interested in the plight of the black ladies' maids that every family has working for them.

Miss Eugenia Phelan ("Skeeter" to her friends) is a young woman of privilege who enjoys her fellow Junior Leaguers but sometimes finds their ways at odds with her own principles. She plays the part of her station in 1960s Mississippi but can't help feeling dissatisfied with keeping house and acting as recording secretary at league meetings, and yearns for something more.

Minny, Miss Celia, Aibileen, and Yule May are maids employed by Skeeter's friends. Each woman cooks, cleans, and cares for her boss's children, suffering slights and insults silently and sharing household
secrets only among themselves.

Seemingly as different from one another as can be, these women will nonetheless come together for a clandestine project that will put them all at risk. And why? Because they are suffocating within the lines that define their town and their times. And sometimes lines are made to be crossed.

In the wake of the Junior League push to create separate bathrooms for the domestic help within private homes, Skeeter contacts a New York book editor with an idea. Soon she's conducting secret meetings with "the help" to capture their stories for publication. It is a daring and foolhardy plan, one certain to endanger not only the positions but the lives of the very women whose stories she transcribes -- as well as her own.

In pitch-perfect voices, Kathryn Stockett creates these extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town, and the way women--mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends--view one another. A deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope, The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.

Kathryn Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. After graduating from the University of Alabama with a degree in English and Creative Writing, she moved to New York City where she worked in magazine publishing and marketing for nine years. She currently lives in Atlanta with her husband and daughter. The Help is her first novel.

Like so many children from her youth in the south and reflective of her first novel, Stockett was raised by an African American domestic worker in lieu of an absentee mother.

In Her Own Words:

Our family maid, Demetrie, used to say picking cotton in Mississippi in the dead of summer is about the worst pastime there is, if you don't count picking okra, another prickly, low-growing thing. Demetrie used to tell us all kinds of stories about picking cotton as a girl. She'd laugh and shake her finger at us, warning us of it, as if a bunch of rich white kids might fall to the evils of cotton-picking, like cigarettes or hard liquor.

"For days I picked and picked. And then I looked down and my skin had bubbled up. I showed my Mama. None of us ever seen sunburn on a black person before. That was for white people!"

I was too young to realize that what she was telling us wasn't very funny. Demetrie was born in Lampkin, Mississippi in 1927. It was a horrifying year to be born, just before the depression set it. Right on time for a child to appreciate, in fine detail, what it felt like to be poor and female on a sharecropping cotton farm.

Demetrie came to cook and clean for my family when she was twenty-eight. My father was fourteen, my uncle seven. Demetrie was stout and dark skinned and, by then, married to a mean, abusive drinker named Plunk. She wouldn't answer me when I asked questions about him. But besides the subject of Plunk, she'd talk to us all day.

Oh, how I loved to talk to Demetrie. I'd sit in my grandmother's kitchen with her, where I went after school, listening to her stories and watching her mix up cakes and fry chicken. Her cooking was outstanding. It was something people discussed at length, after they ate at my grandmother's table. You felt loved when you tasted Demetrie's caramel cake.

But my older brother and sister and I weren't allowed to bother Demetrie during her lunch break. Grandmother would say, 'Leave her alone now, let her eat, this is her time,' and I would stand in the doorway itching to get back with her. Grandmother wanted Demetrie to rest so she could finish her work, not to mention white people didn't sit at the table while a colored person was eating.

That was just a normal part of life, the rules between blacks and whites. As a little girl, seeing black people in the colored part of town, even if they were dressed up or doing fine, I remember pitying them. I am so embarrassed to admit that now.

I didn't pity Demetrie, though. There were several years when I thought she was immensely lucky to have us. A secure job in a nice house cleaning up after white Christian people. But also because Demetrie had no babies of her own and we felt like we were filling a void in her life. If anyone asked her how many children she had, she would hold up her fingers and say three. She meant us, my sister Susan, my brother Rob and me.

My siblings deny it, but I was closer to Demetrie than any of the kids. Nobody got cross with me if Demetrie was close by. She would stand me in the mirror next to her and say, "You are beautiful. You a beautiful girl," when clearly I was not. I wore glasses and had stringy brown hair. I had a stubborn aversion to the bathtub. My mother was out of town a lot. Susan and Rob were tired of me hanging around and I felt left over. Demetrie knew it and took my hand and told me I was fine.

Scene from The Help, a movie currently being filmed.

My parents got divorced when I was six. Demetrie became even more important to me then. When my mother would go on her frequent trips, Daddy put us kids in the motel he owned and brought in Demetrie to stay with us. I'd cry and cry onto Demetrie's shoulder, missing my mother so bad, I'd get a fever from it.

"This where you belong. Here with me," she said and patted my hot leg. Her hands were always cool. I watched the older kids play cards, not caring as much that Mother was away again. I was where I belonged.

The Help is fiction, by far and wide. Still, as I wrote it, I wondered an awful lot what my family would think of it, and Demetrie too, even though she was long dead. I was scared, a lot of the time, that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person. I was afraid I would fail to describe a relationship that was so intensely influential in my life, so loving, so grossly stereotyped in American history.

I read that and I thought, how did he find a way to put it into such concise words? Here was the same slippery issue I'd been struggling with and couldn't catch in my hands, like a wet fish. Mr. Raines managed to nail it down in a few sentences. At least I was in the company of others in my struggle.

Like my feelings for Mississippi, my feelings for The Help conflict greatly. Regarding the lines between black and white women, I am afraid I have told too much. I was taught not to talk about such uncomfortable things, that it was tacky, impolite, they might hear us.

I am afraid I have told too little. Not just that life was so much worse, for many black women working in the homes in Mississippi. But also, that there was so much more love between white families and black domestics, that I didn't have the ink or the time to portray.

But what I am sure about is this: I don't presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially the 1960's. I don't think it is something any white woman, on the other end of a black woman's paycheck, could ever truly understand. But trying to understand is vital to our humanity. In my book there is one line that I truly prize:

Wasn't that the point of the book? For women to realize, we are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I'd thought.

I'm pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask. It was everyday life. It wasn't something people felt compelled to examine.

I have wished, for many years, that I'd been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question. She died when I was sixteen. I've spent years imagining what her answer would be. And that is why I wrote this book.

Discussion questions to enhance your reading:

1. Who was your favorite character? Why?

2. What do you think motivated Hilly? On the one hand she is terribly cruel to Aibileen and her own help, as well as to Skeeter once she realizes that she can’t control her. Yet she’s a wonderful mother. Do you think that one can be a good mother but, at the same time, a deeply flawed person?

3. Like Hilly, Skeeter’s mother is a prime example of someone deeply flawed yet somewhat sympathetic. She seems to care for Skeeter— and she also seems to have very real feelings for Constantine. Yet the ultimatum she gives to Constantine is untenable; and most of her interaction with Skeeter is critical. Do you think Skeeter’s mother is a sympathetic or unsympathetic character? Why?

4. How much of a person’s character would you say is shaped by the times in which they live?

5. Did it bother you that Skeeter is willing to overlook so many of Stuart’s faults so that she can get married, and that it’s not until he literally gets up and walks away that the engagement falls apart?

6. Do you believe that Minny was justified in her distrust of white people?

7. Do you think that had Aibileen stayed working for Miss Elizabeth, that Mae Mobley would have grown up to be racist like her mother? Do you think racism is inherent, or taught?

8. From the perspective of a twenty-first century reader, the hairshellac system that Skeeter undergoes seems ludicrous. Yet women still alter their looks in rather peculiar ways as the definition of “beauty” changes with the times. Looking back on your past, what’s the most ridiculous beauty regimen you ever underwent?

9. The author manages to paint Aibileen with a quiet grace and an aura of wisdom about her. How do you think she does this?

10. Do you think there are still vestiges of racism in relationships where people of color work for people who are white?

11. What did you think about Minny’s pie for Miss Hilly? Would you have gone as far as Minny did for revenge?

From convicts to baseball to autism, our Great Reads for Girls discussion of Al Capone Does My Shirts had it all and more.

Taylor talked about the author.

Gennifer Choldenko was the youngest in her family and had to endure the nicknames of Snot-Nose, Short Stuff, and Shrimp.

Happily, for us, Choldenko grew up to write delightful books for children.

For those who liked Al Capone Does My Shirts the adventure continues in the sequel, Al Capone Shines My Shoes.

The title and publication date of the third in the series has not been released yet.

However, Choldenko has a new children's book which will be released in February 2011.

No Passengers Beyond This Point is a departure from her previous books. It's a "story of adventure and survival, set in a fantastical place with rules all its own." Three siblings fly to their uncle's home in Colorado but when they get there no one's heard of their uncle. "Like Dorothy in Oz, they find themselves in a place they’ve never heard of, with no idea of how to get home, and time is running out."

Tammra told us about Alcatraz Island.

She has been on a tour of the island and showed us lots of pictures.

A prison cell

The prison library

Apartments where the prison guards lived with their families

Children growing up on Alcatraz Island

Children of Alcatraz playing on a deserted cannon

Al Capone, Alcatraz's most famous prisoner

Yara led the discussion.

We talked about how it must've been for Moose to grow up with an autistic sister. One mom shared how difficult it was for her to grow up with a special needs brother. When one family member requires so much attention it's easy for others to feel neglected.

We made yo-yo barrettes and decorated them with buttons. We chose this craft because Natalie, Moose's sister loved to play with buttons.

The moms and their daughters went to work on the yo-yos.

We had lemon cake for dessert because that's what Natalie wanted every morning for breakfast.

And we had Ghiradelli chocolate because when you're in San Francisco you can go to Pier 33 and board a ferry for Alcatraz or you can turn the other direction and and go to Ghiradelli Square.